I am currently reading the book What Happened to Goodbye, by Sarah Dessen.  I think that the main theme of this story is coping with change. Mclean’s parents get divorced after her mom cheats on her dad, and as each person goes their separate ways, you get how each one deals with their sudden new life.

Mclean has gone from living happily with both parents to being constantly on the move with her father, and trying to avoid her mother. Her way with dealing with change is to avoid it entirely. With each move, she adapts an entirely different persona, complete with a new name. She welcomes each move as a chance to create a new character but she never actually is herself. After the first move, she says “I wrapped up and put away 16 years of my life and was born again.” Whenever she leaves, she never says goodbye, she is just there one day and gone the next. I think that when Mclean finally settles down, she is going to have a hard time just figuring out who she really is. Now it feels as if she is living in a play, like she is on the world instead of in it, never really living.

Her mother deals with change by leaving it all behind, and starting her new life, but she starts to lose perspective of the things that matter. She does not even acknowledge the hurt and pain she inflicted upon her daughter and her ex-husband. She moves into her new house with her rich husband, and two baby twins. She seems to forget how she hurt the people around her and instead focuses on what she wants.  Soon after the split, she wants Mclean to live with her year round, not even caring that this will hurt her father even more. She does not understand why Mclean wants to live with her dad when she can live in a huge house and have really anything she wants. When Mclean comes over, she says that she misses the homemade dinners (they now have a maid), the old vacation house, her mom’s old cloths, and the quality family time they used to have.

Mclean can’t move on or accept , so she just avoids it completely, while her mom leaves her old life so fast, she does not even try to make amends for her old mistakes, or remember the things that really matter, like spending time with your family, or making homemade meals. I think that change is a difficult thing to deal with. You can’t forget it altogether, but you cannot stay stuck in it. Different people deal with it in different ways. How do you deal with the past and change?